Chopin’s birthplace – signs of life in the Polish tourist industry?

“Things to do near Warsaw at the weekend” is right up there in the list of World’s Shortest Books alongside “Great French War Heroes”, “1000 Years of German Humour”, “Good American Beer” and “Mother Teresa’s Guide to Erotic Pottery”.
If you live in Warsaw, like we do, you run out of places to “pop out to” [...]

The other Warsaw

Any long-term Warsaw resident knows that this city is strangely transformed in the summer months. They will find themselves, as we did the other day, looking around and saying “who are all these people”? You suddenly become a stranger in your own city, surrounded by people who were not there before. It’s as if every [...]

Poland 20 years later

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s domestic-scale epic Dekalog (The Decalogue) showed life in Poland in the simultaneously dull and precarious late 1980s*. The series provides a fascinating window on Polish culture and everyday life on the eve of the fall of communism. An in-depth analysis of shifts in social patterns and ways of life between 1988 and today [...]

Goodbye ETIUDA terminal – Warsaw airport

Some great news! So great it deserves a tribute. Took them far too long to take the bleeding obvious step of moving from Etiuda to T1 but at least they got there eventually.
So, here’s a little song I’ve titled “We would like to inform you that Etiuda Terminal is due to be closed on the [...]

Warsaw takes drastic action on climate change

Following the great success of ‘Earth Hour’ on 28th March where all lights were extinguished for one hour at 20:30, the Mayor of Warsaw has decided to move the city in one bold move to the leading edge of the fight against climate change.
It was during her time as Vice-President of the European Bank for [...]

Behold! The wonderous new skyline of Warsaw

Nowe centrum Warszawy: szkło, wieżowce, fontanny

For 20 years a team of crack (addicted) architects has been hard at work behind closed doors on the 33rd floor of the Palace of Culture and Science. They recently revealed the 328th version of plans to beautify Plac Defilad and this time they really are trying to hide the [...]

Warsaw roadworks – how to bring a city to its knees!

Traditionally, the period between winter break and Easter is when the Warsaw road planners come out of hibernation and while still not entirely compos mentis start to make decisions on which roads to close. They make these decisions by using a complicated matrix with with points being given to possible closures based on the following [...]

“Bodies” in Blue City, Warsaw

Ludzkie ciało – fascynujące doświadczenie!
This “exhibition” has been touring the world and has finally arrived in Poland. If you want to, you can see it at the Blue City shopping mall in Warsaw until the 19th June. That is of course assuming it has not been closed down before then.
According to this Reuters article, Polish [...]

Warsaw, Indiana and other non-Polish oddities

Polish place names crop up all over North America and other parts of the globe settled by Poles. Nothing particularly amazing about that, but when you’re lying in bed with the dreaded January virus it’s possible to become a little obsessed with looking them all up. From there it’s a small step to collecting photos [...]

Saying something nice, for once.

Krakowskie Przedmieście is one of the oldest streets in Warsaw, having started out as a trade route in the 15th century. The rest of the history you can read in the Wiki article!
When I arrived in Warsaw and for many years afterwards Krak Przed was a potentially very nice street spoiled by too much traffic [...]